Read Online Up Till Now: The Autobiography by William Shatner; David Fisher - Free Book Online Page A

forgetting full pages. The more nervous he got, the more he forgot. By the time we went on the air he’d forgotten almost the entire play and we ended up ad-libbing large sections of the Molière comedy. I know there had to be peoplewatching that play and wondering why they’d never heard those lines before.
    One reason I was in demand was that I learned my lines very quickly. Those years doing a play a week in Canada were paying off. Only once did I have a problem. I was doing a two-parter called No Deadly Medicine for Studio One, in which I played a young doctor trying to save the reputation of an aging doctor no longer capable of practicing safe medicine. Lee J. Cobb played the older physician. At that time Cobb was probably the most respected actor in America. He had starred in the original production of Waiting for Lefty , the play I’d done at the Communist meeting hall; he’d created the role of Willy Loman in the Broadway production of Death of a Salesman. And he’d been nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in On the Waterfront . Every serious actor was in awe of him. And I was co-starring with him. It was the most important role of my career. And the fact that Lee J. Cobb was starring in a two-part show on television made it a major event, so we knew we were going to have a huge viewing audience. In one scene all I had to do was walk across the set. I took three steps and suddenly I remembered Basil Rathbone’s words, “There’s thirty to fifty million people watching . . .” And it hit me, thirty to fifty million people were watching me walk.
    More people were watching me walk across that set than had seen Julius Caesar in his entire lifetime. More people were watching me walk than the entire population of most of the countries in the world. And I became conscious of the way I was walking. Was I walking too fast? Were my strides too long? Did it look natural, was I walking like I really walked? Was I acting like I was walking or walking like I was acting? I felt my legs begin to tighten up. I couldn’t believe it, I was getting stage fright. Walking may well be the most natural of all movements—and I couldn’t remember how to walk naturally. It probably took me eight steps to get across the set, the longest eight steps of my entire life.
    Many years later I was narrating a documentary series entitled Voice of the Planet, for which I traveled around the world. For oneamazing shot a helicopter dropped me off on top of a twenty-thousand-foot-high glacier and left me there alone. “Don’t move,” the producer warned me. “There could be a fault line here somewhere covered by snow. You might step into a crevasse and no one would ever know it.”
    “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I’m not going to move.” Move? I wasn’t so confident about breathing too deeply. The concept was that the chopper would rise slowly to the top of the glacier and suddenly see one man standing there, the only living thing in this vast sea of snow. It was a great idea—until the helicopter took off and left me there more alone than I had ever been in my life. That feeling of loneliness was absolutely incomprehensible. I kept reminding myself that soon the helicopter would be coming back to get me off and I’ll be with my friends and we’ll go down to the village and eat and drink and laugh and talk about what a great shot we did. But then I looked down and realized the helicopter’s landing pads had left two deep impressions in the snow, which would spoil the shot. I’ve got to move just a few feet, I decided.
    I moved several inches at a time, small, tentative steps, testing the snow before I put my weight down. It took me at least ten minutes to move about twenty feet.
    And that’s exactly how I felt walking across the set on Studio One. It was an extraordinary time, we were creating television on a weekly basis. The only rule was that there were no rules, you could do anything you could get away with.